Lock up political critics? Donald Trump is open to it. However, his dominant tactic in his second term is to beat the media into submission.
We're not just talking about regular defamation lawsuits here.
We're talking about Trump now suing an Iowa newspaper for a bad poll. And he's suing the pollster for consumer fraud. He's suing 60 minutes for how he edited the film – a film in which he didn't even take part. He is asking for $10 billion. He is also suing the Pulitzer Prize for rewarding newspapers that reported on his alleged collusion with Russia.
This came after he sued ABC News for claiming he was found responsible for the rape; in fact, he was found responsible sexual abuseBut not rape.
Many media analysts this week expressed shock that parent company ABC decided a rape case without trial. The Disney conglomerate paid out $15 million.
One global expert on free speech called it a used playbook used in autocratic countries: To sue, to sue, and to continue to sue, regardless of whether the lawsuits have merit.
Winning this lawsuit is almost irrelevant, Eric Heinze said. The most important thing is that potential critics should not be afraid of offending you, as this could result in crippling legal fees.
“This is what autocrats do,” said Heinze, a law professor at the University of London and head of the Center for Law, Democracy and Society and author of the book on international lessons learned from freedom of expression.
“Not by telling you how they will oppress you, but by keeping you in suspense as to how, if, and when they will do it. This is the secret of the autocrat. It's not clarity, it's vagueness.”
The goal of chilling the press, he said, is to make it financially risky for people to say things they know are completely legal.
This practice has an acronym: SLAPP
This practice is so common that it has an acronym: SLAPP, short for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. And it is used in all sorts of places, including democracies, by wealthy plaintiffs.
Cherian George comes from a country famous for this practice: Singapore. He said defamation cases were part of the ruling party's standard response to public debate.
In one famous case, a now-defunct magazine published an interview with an opposition leader who accused the Singapore government of using defamation trials to cover up corruption. How did the government react? By sues the newspaper for defamation.
former journalist, George is currently an academic who studies freedom of speech and teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University.
He tells his students, who are mostly from mainland China, that the big difference from the United States is that because of the way courts interpret the First Amendment, it is so difficult for politicians to win a defamation case that they rarely even try.
“I'll have to update this lecture,” George said.
He says much will depend on the willingness of media owners to defend press freedom – as is the case with Hollywood films Washington Post.the battle over the publication of a massive leak of documents about the Vietnam War.
He called the ABC case a failed test and it's not a moment Disney will ever want to commemorate one of its films.
He believes that profit-oriented media owners are susceptible to this political pressure.
Just two days after the Disney settlement, another example of a wealthy media owner trying to get on Trump's good side emerged.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, donated $1 million for Trump's inaugural fund and flew to Mar-a-Lago.
During the last election, he surprised the employees of his own newspaper cancellation an editorial in which he endorsed Trump opponent Kamala Harris.
Trump noted in mysterious post on social media on Thursday that he suddenly became popular among certain anonymous people with a message written in all caps: “EVERYONE WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!”
Disney's desire to have a good time with Trump has been met with much criticism.
NBC host Chuck Todd he complained that his ABC colleague George Stephanopoulos had been dumped. The conservative anti-Trump news site The Bulwark feared that the media would start self-censoring and stop platforming Trump's harshest critics.
Trump once admitted he had a motive for suing the media
However, some reports say the case was more complicated.
New York Post Office suggested Disney chose to avoid an awkward discovery process, including evidence that Stephanopoulos was warned several times before airing to avoid using the word “rape” and then used the word repeatedly.
The New York Times said Disney's lawyers they were worried the case could reach all the way to the Supreme Court and become an excuse to weaken First Amendment jurisprudence.
In the current climate, it is extremely difficult for a public figure in the US to successfully sue for defamation. The media is protected unless it publishes statements deliberately malicious AND recklessly indifferent to the truth.
This is a remnant of a lawsuit in which the New York Times was sued over a 1960 ad against segregation. The police commissioner in Alabama said the document contained errors and unfairly denigrated him, for which he was initially rewarded $500,000but the Supreme Court overturned this decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which forms the basis of current American defamation law.
Were efforts to challenge him. And several Supreme Court judges, especially Clarence Thomassupport reconsideration of this 1964 decision.
In the meantime, most of these cases end up thrown out of court.
Trump unofficially explains, referring to Heinze's earlier comment, that winning is not everything in defamation suits.
Trump admitted as much after suing a journalist in 2006 who questioned his claim to be a billionaire; he sued, lost, and then said it was worth it.
“I spent a few bucks on legal fees and they spent a lot more.” Trump said.
“I did it to make his life miserable, and I'm glad I did.”
Now he's going to make life harder for a few more people.
Former US President Donald Trump angrily hurled insults and threatened to sue a columnist who accused him of raping her during October testimony in a lawsuit filed by the writer. On Friday, the court released video fragments of his testimony.
Summary of Trump Lawsuits
This includes suing one of the most respected pollsters in the US under Art Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. Reason? A disastrously bad poll by Ann Selzer, who retired after a distinguished career.
A few days before the November elections shocked the country with the poll showing Kamala Harris leading in Iowa, which indicated a potential landslide for her across the country, which attracted a lot of media attention due to her achievements.
Trump ultimately won Iowa by 13 points; in his court filing, he claimed that the poll forced his campaign to needlessly expend resources in Iowa and argued that an error of this magnitude was not statistically possible but was in fact malicious.
He is seeking unspecified financial damages from her and is also suing the Des Moines Register newspaper that published the survey.
This is after Trump sued CBS over 60 minutes montage of fragments of the interview with Kamala Harris. The program aired a shortened clip showing her struggling with a topic that was uncomfortable for her: the Middle East. He then resisted calls for the full transcript of the hearing to be publicly released. He is asking for $10 billion.
But The Central Bureau of Investigation denies this Accusing Trump of malice. He says he played one clip of Harris' response on his show and shared it another clip from the same response on another CBS show.
He too suing for the Pulitzer Prize management over awards for newspapers their coverage about alleged collusion with Russia as part of his 2016 campaign – the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” as Trump calls it.
The 2016 scandal resulted in criminal charges Some Trump senior campaign staff and Pulitzers defended the awards told the New York Times and the Washington Post.
In response to the pollster's lawsuit, the Knights Institute for free speech at Columbia University called Trump's efforts ineffective under the First Amendment and urged the court to quickly dismiss them for what they were: an attempt to intimidate and silence.
However, during a press conference this week, Trump expressed his full support for the lawsuits.
In fact, he said, he shouldn't even fund these cases – the U.S. Department of Justice should; in other words, the Department of Justice, which he will begin to run in a month.
“We have to clean up the press,” Trump said.